time John and he were called to the head’s study to be caned. While they waited outside together, John reduced the nervous Pete to tucks by speculating that the head’s cane might be produced like some royal regalia from a case studded with jewels and lined with velvet. They were called in separately to receive their punishment, John going first. A few moments later, the door opened and he emerged on his hands and knees, groaning melodramatically. What Pete didn’t realise was that a small lobby lay between the head’s study and the corridor, so Ernie was quite unaware of this performance. ‘I was laughing so much when I went in that I got [the cane] even harder than John had.’
The five houses in which the boys were grouped supposedly fostered loyalty and brotherhood as well as giving a competitive edge to sporting activities. Each house was named after one of the adjacent suburbs and consisted only of pupils from that neighbourhood, so perpetuating the rivalries and social snobberies that existed between them. Woolton house, which claimed John and Pete, lay about midway in this social microcosm, not quite so select as Childwall or Allerton, but a decided cut above Wavertree and Aigburth.
Also among Quarry Bank’s 1952 intake was Rod Davis, their former classmate at St Peter’s Sunday school. All three were put into the ‘A’ stream of boys considered most intelligent and promising of the batch. From there, while Rod went from strength to strength, John and Pete were quickly downgraded to the ‘B’ and thence with minimum delay to the ‘C’ stream, stopping at that point only because there was nowhere lower to go. ‘I never really understood how that happened,’ Rod Davis says. ‘It was always obvious that John was just as bright or a good bit brighter than anyone else around. But right from the beginning it was obvious he’d made up his mind not to subscribe to the system in any way.’
A strong contributory factor was his extreme shortsightedness, coupled with his obstinate refusal to wear the glasses he so detested. Rather than risk being taunted as a ‘four-eyes’ or a ‘drip’ he preferred to walk around in a state of such mole-like myopia that he could read the number on a bus stop only by shinning halfway up the pole. Davis, it so happened, had even weaker sight but made sure he missed nothing on the blackboard by reading it through opera glasses. John, however, was content to skulk with Pete Shotton at the back of the room, letting sentences, dates, mathematical equations and chemical formulae all swim together into the same untranslatable blur.
Pete’s analogy with Siamese twins may have been more telling than he knew, for John, the one-off, the super-original, never liked acting alone. As he would prove time and again in the future, to flourish at his most individualistic he needed a partner—a kindred spirit perfectly tuned to his special wavelength, acting simultaneously as a stimulus and an audience. Wherever some school rule was most flagrantly broken, the resultant hue and cry would be after ‘Lennon and Shotton’, which John turned into ‘Shennon and Lotton’ to symbolise their inseparability and unanimity of purpose, or purposelessness. Like two chain-gang escapees handcuffed together, neither of them could do anything without the other helplessly following suit.
Over the following terms, Quarry Bank’s punishment book thronged with the diverse crimes of Shennon and Lotton: ‘Failing to report to school office’…‘Insolence’…‘Throwing backboard duster out of window’…‘Cutting class and going AWOL [Absent Without Leave]’…‘Gambling on school field during house [cricket] match…’ Sometimes their offences went off the scale even of Quarry Bank’s draconian punishments, leaving Ernie Taylor no choice but to call in their respective families. Back home at Mendips, Mimi grew to dread the peal of the telephone during school hours. ‘A voice would say, “Hello, Mrs. Smith, it’s the [head’s] secretary at Quarry Bank here…” “Oh Lord,” I’d think. “What’s he done now?” ’
The duo were more or less permanently in detention, either writing out hundreds of lines beginning ‘I must not…’ or engaged in military-style fatigues around the school grounds. It was during such a work detail that they learned the untruth of the axiom ‘Crime does not pay.’ While emptying rubbish into a trash can, Pete came upon three bulky brown envelopes addressed to the headmaster. Inside were used dinner tickets, the vouchers purchased by boys at a shilling apiece to exchange for their school lunch. Used tickets being indistinguishable from unused ones, Shennon and Lotton could resell the whole cache at sixpence each, a bargain that left the purchaser half his daily lunch allowance to spend as he pleased. ‘We had 1,500 dinner tickets up in John’s bedroom,’ Pete remembered. ‘They were worth £75, which was like almost £1,000 today. We were rich. We even gave up shoplifting while that was going on.’
Any teacher showing less than drill-sergeant ruthlessness could expect no mercy from Shennon and Lotton. One afternoon when they returned to Ernie’s study to be carpeted yet again, they found the head absent and his mild little deputy, Ian Gallaway, facing them over the magisterial desk. As Mr Gallaway bent forward to peer at the punishment book, John began gently tickling the few wisps of hair on the deputy head’s cranium. Thinking a fly had landed there, he brushed absent-mindedly at it without looking up. ‘John was laughing so much that he actually pissed himself,’ Pete Shotton remembered. ‘Then Gallaway said, “What’s that puddle on the floor?’ John said, “I think the roof must be leaking, Sir.”’
The curious thing about this stubborn ne’er-do-well was that, away from the classroom and its hated compulsion, he was a bookworm whose taste in literature far outpaced Quarry Bank’s English syllabus and who, left to his own devices, spent hours in the posture of the most conscientious student, reading, writing or drawing.
Quarry Bank’s head of English, Lancelot (‘Porky’) Burrows, was never one of his classroom targets and, indeed, regarded him as a stimulus to other pupils rather than a distraction. Porky dealt with John by appealing to his sense of the absurd, for example instituting a punishment known as whistling detention: if John persisted in whistling when told not to, he would be kept in after school and forced to whistle for ten or so fatiguing minutes. Porky also artfully fostered his interest in poetry via his talent for art. An English exercise book from his junior year at Quarry Bank—neatly covered in brown paper and titled MY ANTHOLOGY—demonstrates what pains he would take if his enthusiasm were aroused. Quotations from classic poems like Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha and Tennyson’s ‘Morte d’Arthur’ are framed by watercolour cartoons showing a remarkable maturity of line and grasp of perspective as well as their unmistakable scatty humour. Porky kept the book to show future generations of students the standard they should aim for.
Two comic artists, one British, one American, were to have a profound influence on John’s style. He loved the intricate, scratchy technique of Ronald Searle, whose sadistic St Trinian’s schoolgirls were modelled on Searle’s guards as a Japanese prisoner of war in Burma. And, thanks to Aunt Mimi, he became a devotee of James Thurber, both the writings for The New Yorker and the cartoons, whose surreally wavering lines were a product of Thurber’s own near-blindness. John later said he began consciously ‘Thurberising’ his drawings from about the age of 15.
He kept a special exercise book for caricatures of his teachers and classmates, organised with a meticulous care that would have astonished Quarry Bank staff other than Porky Burrows. Pete Shotton (‘A Simple Hairy Peters’) popped up repeatedly, with his pale curls and rosy face, shaking a baby’s rattle or peeping from a dustbin. There was even a portrait of the artist himself, wearing his hated National Health glasses and self-deprecatingly captioned ‘Simply A Simple Pimple Shortsighted John Wimple Lennon.’ In this case, ‘Wimple’ did not mean a nun’s veil but was the name of a character in one of John’s favourite radio programmes, Life with the Lyons.
The book was passed around among John’s cronies each time a new character was added to it. Harry Gooseman was once even allowed to take it home overnight to show to his family. John liked to regard it as a campaign of subversion that would bring authority’s direst wrath on his head if it were ever discovered. In fact, Quarry Bank’s teachers were no less sorely in need of some comic relief than the boys, and they tended to laugh just as loudly if they
